Lately, it feels like the firehose we’ve all been drinking from has switched to pumping out bleach. Around the world, autocratic leaders are dismantling democratic norms, threatening opponents, and eroding the rule of law. Online opportunists are sowing chaos and confusion with AI-driven fake content blasts, while habitats and crops are dying off amid ever more extreme climate shifts.
Witnessing what experts now call “the polycrisis”—the parallel unfolding of social, digital, and environmental disaster—brings us face to face with our own powerlessness. What we do as individuals, or even as small groups of thoughtful, committed citizens, is not going to turn things around on its own.
In such conditions, standard well-being practices like meditation, journaling, or yoga may not go far enough to restore inner equilibrium. But recent research suggests an alternate approach: taking small, values-driven actions to strengthen your resolve and sense of agency, even if you’re not yet sure exactly what these actions will add up to.
X
“When life feels chaotic, acting on our values, even in small ways, can restore a sense of direction,” says psychologist and lead researcher Pninit Russo-Netzer, who heads up the Resilience and Optimal Development Lab at Israel’s Achva Academic College. “Not because circumstances improve, but because we remember who we are within them.”
How everyday actions restore agency
Along with the global-scale challenges it presents, this historical moment seems to invite inner limbo. The pull of tradition and settled belief systems will never again be what it once was, and once-revered leaders and institutions seem to betray our trust continually. That makes us vulnerable in ways unique to this unsettled (and unsettling) time: We have cast adrift what injures or no longer serves us, but we may not yet know what to replace it with.
As a resilience specialist, Russo-Netzer wanted to see if deliberate, values-based action could help to fill this meaning vacuum. Though past research showed that people tend to deal better with threats or tough circumstances when they call personal values to mind, Russo-Netzer wondered if this contemplation might be more potent when people acted in ways that backed it up.
So she and her colleague, psychologist Ofer Atad, decided to study whether the rewards of values-based behavior shifts justified the effort they took to make. “We asked, ‘What happens when people move from reflection to intentional action?’”
To map this transition, Russo-Netzer and Atad recruited more than 450 adults on an online survey platform and divided them into three groups. They asked participants in the first group to reflect on their values, choose a concrete action in line with those values, and carry out that action. One participant, for instance, reflected on how important it was to them to nurture their central relationships, resolved to spend more time with their family members, and followed through on that intention. Another reflected on their desire to fulfill their highest goals and opted to spend less time on Instagram and more time pursuing those goals.
Members of the study’s second group reflected on a valued aspect of their life, but did not carry out any action, and members of an inactive control group neither reflected nor acted on their values.
Unsurprisingly, compared to those who did nothing at all, people who took values-driven action reported stronger well-being and fewer anxious and depressive symptoms. Most intriguing, though, was the difference between the affirmation group—those who only reflected on their values—and the action group.
One week after the values exercise, members of the latter group reported greater increases in well-being and a stronger sense of meaning in life, showing that directed action offered a more powerful psychological boost. Russo-Netzer suspects that’s because acting turns abstract-feeling ideals into lived experience, allowing people to prove to themselves they’re actually becoming who they wish to be.
“Small actions anchored in personal values can restore a sense of agency in the moments when people feel most powerless,” Russo-Netzer says. “They help us stay connected to who we are, what matters to us, and what we can still choose.”
Experimental group members also reported higher levels of what the researchers call “self-insight,” suggesting that not only can values-driven action restore your agency, it helps give you the knowledge and perspective you need to make thoughtful future choices.
Developing an action practice
The well-being advantage that action supplies is crucial in the face of grim global realities, says Boston-based psychologist Janna Koretz, who specializes in decision making under stress.
“In times of disarray, people often feel really out of control,” she says—but when people begin taking daily, problem-solving action, “they’re then learning, ‘Oh, I do control a little bit more. I feel more grounded. Things aren’t just happening to me.’” Psychiatrist Viktor Frankl famously reported a similar inner shift, getting through confinement at Auschwitz by resolving to choose his own way in the midst of any circumstance.
Yet reaping these well-being benefits takes sustained, effortful commitment. Changing your behavior, Russo-Netzer says, requires surmounting what experts call an “activation barrier”—overcoming the natural human impulse to stick to the status quo. To take an action like going to a civic protest or weekend volunteer program, you have to give up the ease of inertia, as well as some of your free time.
To get more comfortable resisting inertia, you can try a version of the exercise Russo-Netzer designed for her study participants.
First, identify what your core values are in key areas of your life. Do you feel strongly about connecting members of your community, working on innovations that benefit people, or creating opportunities for kids and teens at risk?
Next, choose a specific action that lines up with one of the core values you identified. If caring for the vulnerable means a lot to you, you can sign up to stand with a immigrant in court or volunteer to get food and supplies for families under threat. If you value showing up for close loved ones, you can schedule time to call someone you haven’t talked to in a while—and actually follow up on that intention.
Zeno Franco, a psychologist and researcher at the Medical College of Wisconsin, has seen the real-world dividends such practices can yield. When leading support groups for veterans, many of whom struggle to resume normal life after serving in war zones, Franco engages group members in discussions of how they can act in ways that express their values. In one-on-one therapy, he takes a similar, more personalized approach.
In both cases, Franco’s goal is to convince people to take on “a very small task that goes to the core of the value that has been somehow damaged by decisions or just by life,” he says: writing a note of apology to someone they’ve hurt, or engaging in dialogue with someone whose worldview contradicts theirs. Through tasks like this, people arrive at an inner resolve that looks like “flexible steadiness,” Franco says, “being steady day in and day out as the tides of the times rise and fall.”
Values-based actions don’t have to be grand gestures to instill this steadiness and resolve. “The mechanism is not about the magnitude of the action,” Russo-Netzer says. “What matters is that the action serves as a self-signal—a tangible reminder that I am showing up as the person I aspire to be.”
How small daily actions take on momentum
When you approach this practice in an exploratory, iterative way, it can yield surprising results over time that you couldn’t have foreseen at the outset. With each step you take, not only do you get more comfortable with acting, you get valuable feedback that guides your next move.
“With these small steps, they’re really easy,” Koretz says, “and then you have an anchor to make other choices.”
In addition, your actions in specific moments can give rise to new chances for effective intervention. By showing up for a single community meeting or volunteer outing, you may learn about other opportunities you wouldn’t have encountered otherwise, broadening the range of future actions available to you.
As your skill and confidence grows, you can carry out ever more meaningful actions, which in turn build your confidence still more, a virtuous cycle that takes on its own momentum, diminishing deep-rooted feelings of powerlessness.
“It is the combination of awareness, affirmation, and action that creates a positive feedback loop,” Russo-Netzer says. “The more we act in line with our values, the more we feel like our life makes sense—and the more motivated we are to continue.”
